World tour biker suffers heart attack after 3000 miles

A thrill-seeking biker was just 3,000 miles in to a four year around the world adventure when a massive heart attack forced him to abandon his plans.

Nigel Swaby, 55, from Nottingham had sold everything he owned to fund the trip, which was to take him to 83 countries, but only made it to Ouarzazate in Southern Morocco before disaster struck.

“I was just about to go further south in to the Sahara Desert, and if I’d had the heart attack there the doctors said it would have been a case of finding my bones,” Swaby said.

Luckily he was not even out riding his bike, but sitting in his room at the Bikershome Off-Road Centre in Ouarzazate, when he suffered the attack, so was found immediately and rushed to hospital in the town.

The attack had been so severe that he was transferred overnight by a hair-raising ambulance ride through the Atlas Mountains, to a hospital in Marrakech where he was fitted with a stent (a steel tube to open an artery) and then repatriated to England to recuperate.